Category TV

Dream between the lines… dream like a ninja

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While pondering this week in culture, dreamingbetweenthelines did wonder what the connective tissue was between the highlights of the week. After all, there’s nothing immediately obvious that links Eminem and So You Think You Can Dance.

Challenge accepted.

Eminem’s Recovery is what might be considered a legacy album. The shocks and the jokes he made his name on are clever and fine, for a while. But even the man himself, in a recent interview in Spin magazine, admitted that  last year’s Relapse didn’t break as much new ground as it could have, with its familiar Mariah Carey disses and old-school Eminem insults.

Fortunately, he did something about it: Recovery is a forceful, incredibly detailed, furiously rapped set of tracks that lays bare, with painful, raw detail, his long, tortured journey through loss, addication, rehab and, yes, recovery. It’s brutally honest, searingly self-aware. This time Eminem has turned his fierce analytical skills and lacerating wordplay on himself, and the result is extraordinary. Whether flat-out singing on the Lost Boys soundtrack-sampling, moving anthem to fallen friend Proof, You’re Never Over, or serving up a raw personal journey on Going Through Changes, or dissecting an abusive, destructive relationship through a combustible, explosive duet with Rihanna on Love The Way You Lie, Eminem keeps moving, ducking and diving, weaving like the pro that he is, ever moving, ever evolving, always hungry, never satisfied. That prowling restlessness punches through every track here.

It’s Eminem’s brilliant writing and creativity that’s particularly thrilling on Recovery. Likewise, on the unusually inspiring TV show So You Think You Can Dance, creativity is breaking through in exhilarating ways. Executive Producer Nigel Lythgoe has crafted a show that evolves its dancers far beyond their comfort zones, drawing greatness from them along the way. It’s true of the show too, which has had to evolve in the face of adversity this season: it’s great to see a large-format show that can think and move so lightly on its feet. This season’s contestants have had flashes of brilliance; tough to do when you’re on stage with the designated All-Stars. Props must go out to b-boy Jose Ruiz, whose breaking has become truly sick in the last couple of weeks: his solos have been breakneck, precise, fluid, furious, like Eminem’s rhymes. He was always decent, but he found a way to energize and galvanize, and he’s been spinning and busting moves like an inspired Bruce Lee, if Bruce Lee did headspins. He hasn’t delivered on the other styles though, unlike this season’s breakout star Lauren Froderman, who is basically already an All-Star at this point. As judge and movie director Adam Shankman pointed out, she’s essentially already graduated the show with her extreme skill and flow, and some insane moves that look like special effects. When she was in the bottom three, her warm, soulful solo set her apart from the pack.

Throughout the season, All-Star Lauren Gottlieb has reinforced exactly why she’s one of the greatest dancers the show has ever produced, dancing a lot of the competitors off the stage despite being a great partner in any routine. Perhaps the most startling development though has been outside of the competition, with the ascension of All-Star Kathryn McCormick. She was a standout on season six, with her beautiful emotionality, and her fluid chemistry with breaker Legacy. But on this season, she has grown beyond even that, by demonstrating that dance can and should be a transcendent form of creativity and self-expression. The emotion pours out of her in the contemporary routines as she couples intensity with lightness and grace. It’s remarkable how she can submerge herself so deeply into the feelings of the choreography: it’s the difference between someone repeating steps and someone flowing through beautiful moves that make you feel loss, want, need and desperation. We hear a lot of talk from the judges about clean lines, when describing a contestant’s movements. Many of them have beautiful lines, it’s true: but Kathryn moves like the dream between the lines.

Transcendence is where you find it. And what else is transcendence but mastery of your creative world? True mastery of a chosen form is thrilling to witness: hearing Eminem spit quick and skillful rhymes, and watching Kathryn transform her movements and taking us on an aching journey, it’s hard not to feel inspired. Whether we are rappers, dancers or writers (spoiler: I am only one of the above), this is what we should be aiming for: being able to master our form, transcend it so that those watching can’t even see how we do it. We need to be like ninjas; you should never know we were there. As a screenwriter, how do you handle a complex scene with exposition and character development and make it subtle and exciting? Hide the heavy lifting and write like a ninja. Many thanks to talented TV writer and blogger Margaux Froley for that analogy: it’s the perfect way to think about creativity. Do complex and beautiful things and never give away your secrets. Make the reader or viewer forget they are listening to a rap album, watching choreography, reading a novel or a poem: go beyond the mechanics to another place. Know the lines, master them: then dream between them.

True Blood: Trouble

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It’s true: this week’s episode of True Blood was the best yet in the show’s three seasons. Why? Because Alan Ball and his writers are perhaps the finest team in the business right now (with Southland, Californication, Glee, Fringe,  Modern Family and Nurse Jackie).

With ‘Trouble’, they  took everything great about the series, and punched it the f**k up.

The show has fully grown into its core strengths: utter insanity, and a visceral, joyous sense of combustibility. True Blood now deeply revels in the possibility that any given moment on the show could violently explode into beautiful, raw, sexy chaos. The show thrives on this constant state of danger, handling it with an intense stare and crazed, high-velocity humor. The dialogue snarls, rips and tears through every scene like one of the wolves amped-up on Vampire blood. The writers throw lines like Jason Bourne throws punches: this is writing like Krav Maga – the  brilliance reveals itself with dizzying speed, line after line after line.

All this has been richly surrounded in this season by the growing depth and complexity of the vampire political and power structures, which has proved to be fascinating source of menace, conflict and fascination, and a chance for the actors to play some great scenes.

The energy from the actors in this particular episode was fantastic, and they had awesome writing to work with, to play with. Watching James Frain access pitch-perfect, utterly unhinged madness as the crazy vampire Franklin Mott (interesting in itself as the show hadn’t shown us vampires who were truly insane), or Stephen Moyer and Denis O’Hare as Bill and Russell playing their diabolically subtle power games, or Anna Paquin continuing her raw, edgy emotional makeover. In many ways, it was Franklin and Tara that propelled this episode with the show’s signature blend, its seamless, unholy and explosive mix of “what the f**k?!”, genuine danger, and sick, literally twisted humor. When Bill and Lorena had their vampire hate sex at the end of episode three, this writing team delivered their TV game-changer: as Lorena’s head slowly turned around, so did the television landscape.

That’s what Alan Ball and his writers (and the stellar cast and crew), have done with this season: changed the landscape, with each episode, with each scene, with each line sometimes. They are charging the show with plummeting rollercoaster velocity into completely unpredictable territory: we have no idea which insane left turn it’s going to take next, and that’s an extraordinary feat of story-breaking. Not only that, these writers deliver some truly nuanced emotional and psychological arcs, accessing the existential sadness of the vampire’s existence, and the many kinds of desire, the endless different ways we can lust after each other.

If there’s anything to criticize, it’s that Jason’s arc seems to be far away from the rest of the converging stories, Sam’s story is unfolding at a slower pace than the other arcs, and for now, Jessica appears to have been abandoned in Merlotte’s. This last is particularly upsetting since, as one character put it, Jessica is a “smokin’ hot vampire, in the majors.” Yes, she is. Therefore it would be great to see her brought into the monumental clusterf**k that is undoubtedly awaiting the rest of the characters by season’s end.

However, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from watching this show, it’s this: trust the writers.

Firstly, they know how to amp shit up: they salvaged the relative smallness of Jason’s story (compared to the high drama of the others) by pulling out a “classic Jason” moment, giving Ryan Kwanten an actor’s dream entrance to a scene: they were duly rewarded with ‘Jason Stackhouse’ being the number one trending topic on Twitter the next day.

Secondly, simply, they always weave their complex plot strands together in the end, as amply demonstrated by the previous two seasons.

Each episode so far this season has roared through the TV stratosphere, and the deep, dark power of the wars to come is looming. This is one of TV’s most purely thrilling experiences, and this episode took it further still.

24 – 00:00:00 [series finale spoilers]

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From the sly reappearance for the final two episodes of the original introductory “events occur in real time,” it was clear that 24 was going to end the way it was always meant to, with a deeply fulfilling and thrilling sense of natural conclusion. Led by Howard Gordon, Kiefer Sutherland and the rest of the heroic 24 writers’ room, the creative team brought 24 home through an emotionally brutal season that stripped story down to its bare bones and allowed it to rocket brutally to the beautifully played final moments. The writers of this show outdid themselves, and they have set extraordinarily high standards throughout the last 8 seasons. From the opening scenes of Day One, 12 a.m., the show has blended Jack’s emotional life with the larger forces of threat and danger. Both strands have always been intertwined in the name of the series’ true god: intensity. It was a writer’s dream in some ways: complex inner lives played out against critically high stakes that threatened not just our central characters’ lives, but frequently the fabric of America itself – and all of it having to be delivered with the pedal to the metal in a race against that elegant digital readout. This was always a digital show, blurring technology just into the future, fetishizing it, but only in service of the plot. Even the emotions of the final moments needed advanced technology to play out – and in its ending, 24 demonstrated in a virtuoso fashion how to use high-tech devices to perfectly understated, devastating effect. As the seasons progressed, the streamlined future-glow of the set design increased (seasons 3 and 8 marked particular increases in the sophistication of the surroundings), and some of the more domestic aspects fell further back, in favor of the more fascinating psychological journey taken by Bauer as his pain and emotional wounds accumulated, as pieces of his soul were chipped away by the actions he was forced to take to save us. These writers broke story like no-one else. By the end of the series finale, the story was like Jack himself: brutally beaten but unyielding. There was more plot in one episode of 24 – hell, in one act of the show – than in whole seasons of some other shows. To write a season of 24 was a demanding exercise in brutal dominion over story. The writers earned this finale; it was hard-fought and hard-won. It was the ending that the show demanded, and arose only from what went before. Everything was important in the end, every moment of those 8 days led Jack to this point. The end of 24 seemed to contain the entire series in a powerful distillation of its entire ethos and reason for being. It was a cathartic release that was entirely necessary. 24 raced headlong and demanded furious precision with every second. The show contained powerhouse performances, in the final season particularly. Kiefer Sutherland: the man is a true legend – never dropping the intensity level, never yielding. He fought, hard, for every single scene, and found new reservoirs of emotional pain for these final episodes. Gregory Itzin as Charles Logan: the personification of shifty, shady immorality. There was something Shakespearean about the sheer psychological detail of his deceptions: his face a shifting sea of complications and machinations. The only response to this was the one taken by Jack as he suited up in full body armor and face mask, like a dark knight or future warrior stripped for those moments of even Bruce Wayne’s humanity: Jack became pure, faceless vengeance. Of course, by the end, Jack was stripped of everything that he held dear. In some of the series’ finest acting, he spoke with Chloe and said goodbye in a simple scene that was heartrending. In their own platonic way, Jack and Chloe had the longest-running and purest relationship on the show; seeing the show end on them was perfect storytelling. Mary Lynn Rajskub, who has been for many years the essential heroine of this show, truly delivered the emotional goods, just as Annie Wersching had a few episodes earlier (Renee Walker’s arc was tragic and haunting, and Wersching nailed every moment). Watching Rajskub slowly disintegrate as she realized she might never see her friend again was one of the great moments of recent television. Mention must also be made of Freddie Prinze Jr, who delivered a convincing and honest performance as a by the book CTU agent who is ultimately torn away from his rules. 24 pushed the boundaries of network drama: with its real-time structure, the split screens, the fact that its lifeblood was relentless intensity, the way it allowed a movie star to rise again as a force of TV nature, and in the way it could shift gears from crescendos of violence to deeply emotional arcs and back again without ever slowing down. It always had a force and intensity that made other shows seem slow. But it was time to say goodbye, for now. The show had explored many kinds of threats: the final season took the lessons learned from the previous seasons and harnessed every trick in its book plus a whole new set of techniques to power through its final day. It was a show at the height of its powers. We already know that Jack will be back on the big screen. In the meantime, the show gave us a perfect finale that still kept moving. The show like a shark remained in perpetual motion, even after the final clock  ticked down to 00:00:00.

beyond the darkness lies the truth

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Emotional truths are risky things to obtain. To place yourself in the emotional abyss in order to tell us something about the human soul is a dangerous enterprise, whether you are an actress, writer, philosopher, musician, creator of art installations, dancer… Why do we search for this? What possesses artists to go on the difficult journey to bring us some kind of truth? Showtime’s series Californication gives us some insight into this journey, telling the story of Hank Moody, a New York writer forced to stay in LA by a relationship that subsequently disintegrated, leaving him washed up in the brutal city of artists and dreamers. The first episode of this series was a masterpiece in miniature. It revealed the writer, played by David Duchovny in a manner described by the Guardian as “revelatory,” tormented by the emotional realities of a life truly messed up. The writer whose “exercise in nihilism”, God Hates Us All, was turned into a romantic comedy. The writer whose insistence on an alternative, punk, rock’n’roll, Bukowski-loving, tradition-shunning outlook on life has separated him from the love of his life, and his daughter. He journeyed into the darkness to write brutal truths, and perhaps didn’t come all the way back. That first episode ended with Hank staring helplessly into the darkness of an LA night, with My Morning Jacket’s version of Rocket Man drifting mournfully in the background. It conjured an intergalactic loneliness, the lonely voice of God murmuring truths about the dark night beyond the lights, the lizard kings and run-down bars, strange creatures moving around out there, and nothing human left in the universe; a perfect encapsulation of isolation. By the end of episode two, Hank was alone, again, sitting in his car at night, desperately haunted by the emptiness of the passenger seat, while a voice on the soundtrack described how “some nights I wish that the sun would never show its face.” Hubert Selby Jr, author of searing, unflinching portrayals of the human soul such as Requiem For A Dream and The Demon, writes of the requirement to to go as deep into the darkness as possible to bring back the truth into the light. He notes that, “obviously, there is always the chance that you will go too deeply into the darkness and not come back.” He took the risk of the artist in placing himself in unsettling and terrible emotional places; walking the emotional and psychological high-wire out to, and back from, from the loneliest of places. Searching in these lonely places for truth, discovering things about what it means to be human; this is not the end. The journey back still awaits; the truths must be conveyed. It has been said many times that writers lie to tell the truth, since words on a page are not truths or things in the world; they are words on a page, symbols, non-representational. How should the artist convey the things they have discovered? What language should they use? Words and movements, art and music, can evoke these elusive emotions. The most non-representational form can convey the most exact truth. Acting, for example, is not real, but the transformation of consciousness it requires cannot be faked. Who really knows what transformative effects the truth will have upon one’s consciousness? One cannot truly know without experiencing it. It’s why we do it.